Broken Promises & Bagging the Competition

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Competition, Ethics & Values, Value Proposition & Value Add, Vision, Mission & Purpose

Watching the antics of all the parties in the Federal Election, especially the two major parties, and how they go about trying to convince the electorate to vote for them, has reminded me about what NOT to do in sales:

  • Make promises you cannot keep
  • Bag the competition

Nothing irks customers more than sales people overstating their capabilities and making claims and promises they cannot keep or live up to. It’s the fastest way to break trust and leave customers doubting you and your business. Making grand claims with little or no substance is foolish at …

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A Time To Reflect

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Emotional Intelligence, Mindful selling, Wellbeing

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself reflecting on a whole range of things in my life including my professional sales career and wondering at all the things I have learned over the years.

Conscious reflecting on sales has now become almost a daily occurrence for me, especially, since I have been writing this sales blog. There are so many aspects to selling that the more I look into selling the more I find to reflect upon. So it was with some amusement that I found myself reflecting on reflecting itself and how valuable it …

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Learn to say ‘NO’

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Communication, Ethics & Values, Resilience, Sales Skills, Sales Training, Value Proposition & Value Add

Giving away the margin and undercutting your prices because you can’t say ‘NO’ is no good for anyone. It devalues you, your product, and your market. If done on mass then customers expect ‘cheap’ all the time, not fully appreciating the real value of the products or services they buy. All you do is risk devaluing you and your business.

Just look at the ‘perpetual sales’ going in retail all the time. No one ends up making any money and people go out of business.

Let’s face it; there will always be someone offering their products or services cheaper than you. …

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What do clients want?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Relationships, Value Proposition & Value Add

Clients don’t expect to be coerced, bullied, tricked or intimidated into buying. They don’t expect to be treated like an idiot by sales people who just talk at them and flash brochures or product sheets. Relationships do not work effectively if they are forced!

Clients are now after ‘Business people’who can sell.

Most clients know what they are after even if they don’t know how to articulate it sometimes.

The ‘market challenger’ or ‘early adopter’ clients are open to new ideas and innovations and whilst they don’t know what they don’t know they are often happy to see competent sales people to learn …

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Being authentic in sales

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Sales Relationships, Value Proposition & Value Add, Vision, Mission & Purpose

The 20th century approach of one-upmanship, although still encouraged by many traditional sales managers, seems to be slowly retreating into the shadows of the past as crude and old-fashioned. Polar opposite to the latter, but just as unproductive, are the approaches of:

  • A whining puppy (pleading for a sale trying to make customers feel sorry for you).
  • A chameleon (always bending and twisting yourself to fit any situation, often losing yourself in the process).
  • A parrot (not adapting your approach enough to suit the style if the client).

These approaches often annoy customers and elicit pity rather than trust.

Too many sales people (in particular …

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Ashamed of being in sales

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Call Reluctance, Ethics & Values, Mindful selling, Prospecting, Value Proposition & Value Add, Wellbeing
  • Need you daily fix of self-help tapes/CDs or guru books to get you pepped up to sell.
  • Have a fragile positivism about sales, which bursts at the slightest criticism.
  • Can’t wait to get out of sales to get a “real” job.
  • Secretly ashamed of being in a sales career – this isn’t what I should be doing, my mother wants me to be a dentist.
  • Fear the loss of approval of your friends, family or peers because you think they will think less of you if you are in sales.
  • Don’t like being called a sales person – prefer titles like marketing consultant or pre-need …

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Influencing vs Negotiating

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Negotiation, Sales Relationships, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Training

It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in …

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Getting Sales Recruitment Right

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Role Clarity, Sales Assessments, Sales Consulting, Sales Psychology, Sales Talent

Your small business is growing and diversifying. You’ve experimented with bringing in an inexperienced sales person (who did not work out). You realise you need a more experienced direct sales person, but you don’t know where to go or what to look for.

All you know is you need a sales person who is able to prospect for, and win, new business opportunities on a consistent daily basis, however you are not really able to detail anything else. You know your recruitment approach is haphazard at best. And what’s worse, it’s costing you big time.

You are not alone. Many SMEs …

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The Power of Women in Sales Leadership

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Gender & Sales, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Relationships, Sales Research

As the New York Stock Exchange is now looking at “employee engagement” as a significant predictor of higher share value and market return, and given we are all competing, not just for clients and market share but for good employee talent, maybe a key performance indicator for sales management could be in Organisational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB).

I came across some recent research into sales management, and it got me thinking about how team leaders were not allowed to “mother” their sales teams.

A loaded term, “mothering”, and without proper definition creates myths and innuendo where none should exist. The following research piece …

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Sales and emotional intelligence

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brain Science, Emotional Intelligence, Mindful selling, Neuroscience in Sales, Sales Relationships, Self Development, Success, Wellbeing

The “gender” discussion highlighted by my Sell like a Woman project, articles and other research leads people to believe that women are doing things men cannot because of gender. And this is causing sighing and forelock tugging in some male circles. “Not another feminist on her soap box” or “all men are useless” I hear some say.

As stated previously, my approach is not to denigrate men or idolise women, but to bring you information and findings that give you food for thought to help you make decisions so that you can be more successful at what you choose to do …

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